Page 76 of The Shattered Rite
He was made for places like this.
But tonight… something pressed against that certainty. A presence, still near. A pull.
Eliryn.
The dragonrider.
His gloved fingers drifted to the ring on his right hand—the blood-forged signet that marked him as the king’s blade. Its weight was constant, but tonight, it felt heavier. He twisted it once, feeling the cold bite of its magic brush against his pulse.
It knows,he thought grimly.It knows what it was made to kill.
And perhaps… it already recognized her.
She shouldn’t have unsettled him. And yet… her presence lingered longer than he liked. Too long.
He hated thinking about her.
And still, he thought of the way her voice had sounded when she said his name. How her injuries hadn’t made her smaller. How the marks on her skin caught the light like they belonged there. Like they were meant for her.
His hands flexed without him realizing.
Malric stopped beneath a crumbling arch, one hand braced on the stone, steadying himself. He knew this sensation. Knew how it started: the mind looping back, caught on a problem it couldn’t solve. Obsession, his father would say, is failure disguised as discipline.
But Eliryn wasn’t just a problem.
She was becoming a fixation.
And fixations were dangerous.
For everyone involved.
He knew that.
And yet, when he closed his eyes, it wasn’t her power he remembered. It was her.
The way she stood after exhaustion should have broken her. The faint tilt of her head when she listened like she didn’t trust what her own eyes told her. The brief, unguarded smile she gave him in the library, like she didn’t know he was supposed to kill her.
Her smile haunted him more than her magic.
He hated that.
Some part of him wondered—darkly, quietly—what it would feel like to be the last thing she trusted. To be the one she looked to, when the others fled.
That was the part of himself he knew better than to listen to.
Because when Malric fixated on something… he never let it go.
Not until it bled.
Not until it broke.
He forced himself to move, sinking to one knee and testing the ground with his palm. Warm. Still shifting. The trial was awake, watching, weighing every step.
He should be moving. But his hand lingered against the earth, and his thoughts strayed back.
To her.
The way she’d held the sword, awkward but unafraid. The way she asked questions no one else dared. The way she didn’t flinch when she thought he was an illusion, didn’t run when she realized he wasn’t.
